Murder of an Idealist

According to senior State Department officials, the agent in the tactical-operations center saw, on the screen monitoring the main gate, armed men swarming in. There were too many to count. He punched the alarm, grabbed the microphone for the loudspeakers. "Attack! Attack!" he yelled.

The other four security agents were in the main residence with Stevens and Smith. One of them hustled the ambassador and Smith into the back half of the building, dropped the metal grille, sealed them inside the safe haven. The other three sprinted for their own automatic weapons and body armor. The agent with Stevens and Smith radioed that they were secure in the safe haven.

The barracks at the front gate of the compound was in flames, and attackers were spreading through the property. They broke into the main residence, which was very dark. They tried the locks on the grille to the safe haven but couldn't break them. The security agent, quiet in the shadows, trained his M4 submachine gun on their silhouettes, ready to fire if they made it into the safe haven. They didn't. But they had jerricans of diesel fuel from the barracks. They doused the floor, the furniture, the puffy couches and overstuffed chairs, and set the place alight.

Oily smoke and the fumes of melting synthetics billowed through the residence, choking, poisoning the men trapped inside. Stevens, Smith, and the bodyguard moved into a bathroom, got to a window covered with a grate. The smoke was a black fog. The men were down on the floor, gasping for whatever air was left in the building. They decided to get outside, so they crawled to a bedroom where the window grille could be opened from the inside.

The agent, wheezing and half blind from the smoke, flopped out onto a patio bunkered with sandbags. He immediately came under fire: There were dozens of attackers flooding Château Christophe, firing wildly.

Neither Stevens nor Smith followed the agent out the window, so the agent climbed back in after them. He couldn't find either man. He went back out for a gulp of fresher air, then came back in again, out, in, out. He still couldn't find Stevens or Smith. His lungs and throat seared, the agent managed to pull himself up a ladder to the roof. He collapsed as he radioed the other guards.

The other four American security operatives could barely understand him. The attackers had broken inside Building B, the smaller residence at the compound, but they couldn't get to the agents barricaded in an interior room, and they hadn't been able to penetrate the operations center at all.

There wasn't a direct line of sight from either Building B or the operations center, but the agents could see a black cloud rising. They had to get to the safe room in the main residence. An agent in the operations center opened the door, lobbed a smoke grenade to cover him, then sprinted into Building B, joining the other two agents. The three of them got into an armored SUV parked outside and floored it to the main residence. Two of the agents held off the attackers while the third slipped inside. He searched for Stevens and Smith on his hands and knees until the smoke got too bad and he had to get outside for some air. He went back in, and when he was too incapacitated, another agent took his place. Then the third.

One of them found Smith and pulled him out. He was already dead from the smoke. But they still couldn't find Stevens.

Reinforcements arrived, six Americans from a quick-reaction force stationed in an annex about a mile away, accompanied by sixteen more men from the 17th of February Martyrs Brigade. They retrieved the lone agent from the operations center, who'd been on the phone calling for backup from the quick-reaction team and Tripoli. Then all the men regrouped at the main residence. The agent from the operations center clambered inside; a couple of the reinforcements did, too. None of them could find Stevens. Finally, the agent who'd made all the calls stripped off his T-shirt, soaked it in a swimming pool, wrapped it around his face, made one more sweep. Nothing.

The Americans and their Libyan allies tried to hold a perimeter around the residence, but, overwhelmed, they were forced to evacuate to the annex. The ambassador's security agents piled into an SUV with Smith's body.

The fleeing Americans took fire, close-range, coming out of the compound. Farther down the road, more armed men strafed the vehicle with automatic rifles. A hand grenade bounced off it; another rolled underneath. Two tires were blown out. The SUV was still rolling but slowed by traffic, so they jumped a median and drove down the wrong side of the road.

They reached the annex. The men got into firing positions inside the walls and on the roof. For hours they took bursts of rifle fire and RPGs. In the early morning, more reinforcements arrived, Americans flown in from Tripoli. Still the attack continued. At about four o'clock, mortars fell from the dark sky. One landed on the roof. Two former Navy Seals, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, were killed, and a third man—one of Stevens's original bodyguards—was badly wounded.

The survivors decided to abandon the city. They organized a convoy of SUVs, secured a route to the airport from friendly militiamen, and finally escaped on two airplanes just after dawn.

The fire in the residence eventually died down. The attackers faded away. Libyans, maybe looters or maybe just curious men, managed to break into the safe haven, where they found Stevens. They pulled him out, carried him from the compound, loaded him into a car, raced to the hospital.